Islandora CLAW

Islandora CLAW (formerly known as Islandora 7.x-2.x) is the next generation of Islandora. Still in development, this major upgrade will be compatible with Drupal 8 and Fedora 4. For more details, please check out the following resources:

Latest CLAW News

We've just wrapped up our first community sprint on providing a more modular and flexible installer using Ansible, and it was totally awesome. Our team of active community volunteers tackled Ansible head on and nearly brought claw-playbook to feature parity with claw_vagrant. This means that once a few outstanding issues are resolved, claw-playbook will not only replace claw_vagrant for development environments, but can also be used to install CLAW on bare metal! This is what we've all been waiting for!
This giant leap forward could not have happened without our talented and dedicated community volunteers. We'd like to thank each and every one of you (and your bosses!) for generously donating your time and talents to our cause:

Bryan Brown (Florida State University)

Jared Whiklo (University of Manitoba)

Adam Soroka (Smithsonian Institution)

Natkeeran Kanthan (University of Toronto Scarborough)

Marcus Barnes (University of Toronto Scarborough)

Jonathan Green (LYRASIS)

Diego Pino (Metropolitan New York Library Council)

Rosie Le Faive (University of Prince Edward Island)

Brian Woolstrum (Carnegie Mellon)

Yamil Suarez (Berklee College of Music)

Gavin Morris (Born-Digital)

And remember folks, we still have more devops goals to reach for, like multi-server setups and containerization. So be on the lookout for another call for stakeholders soon!

A small but mighty dream team of Islandora CLAW contributors answered our call for stakeholders and are now coming together over the next two weeks to work on the first official Islandora CLAW Sprint of 2017.

The team:

Danny Lamb (Islandora Foundation)

Bryan Brown (Florida State University)

Jared Whiklo (University of Manitoba)

Adam Soroka (Smithsonian Institution)

Natkeeran Kanthan (University of Toronto Scarborough)

Marcus Barnes (University of Toronto Scarborough)

Jonathan Green (LYRASIS)

Diego Pino (Metropolitan New York Library Council)

Rosie Le Faive (University of Prince Edward Island)

Brian Woolstrum (Carnegie Mellon)

Yamil Suarez (Berklee College of Music)

Gavin Morris (Born-Digital)

The goal: a modular installation process that meets the following criteria:

Capable of supporting multiple operating systems

Supports Vagrant, bare metal, and eventually Docker containers

Can be used for both all-in-one installs as well as more complex setups involving multiple servers

Can be used to maintain/update existing installations as the CLAW codebase evolves

Is well documented

Ansible has been identified as the dev/ops tool that fits best with these goals, and over the course of several sprints the existing claw_vagrant codebase will be adapted into an Ansible based solution. You can follow their work with this project in Github or by staying tuned for more updates here.

The Islandora Foundation is seeking volunteers for stakeholders in our first community sprint geared towards creating an Ansible based installation for CLAW. Please see this short document for more information outlining what we hope to accomplish during the sprint and what is expected of stakeholders.

We're scheduling the work for the weeks of August 21st and 28th, just before Labour Day. If you or your organization is interested in helping us offer an improved installation process while gaining valuable experience working with Islandora CLAW, please add your name to the signup sheet.

This sandbox is, like Islandora CLAW itself, still something of a work in progress, so you can expect to see new functions and configurations appear over the next few weeks, and a lot of changes to come as we work with the community to determine development priorities post-MVP (for more background on that process, check out the CLAW FAQ). But for now, please come in and kick the tires and get a feel for Drupal 8 with Fedora 4. Please let us know about bugs, improvements, and new features you'd like to see by filing an issue in GitHub (not sure how? check out CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions).

Some differences you'll notice from the old Islandora:

"Add Content" - just like you're making a Drupal page. There is no special menu to add new Islandora objects in CLAW. Add them from any part of the site and indicate the parent, instead of having to navigate to the collection you want the object created in.

Your objects are nodes. Don't like the standard collection view? Go ahead and use Drupal Views to build whatever you like.

No XML Form Builder. Want to edit your metadata forms? You can use the regular Drupal form builder for each content type to add and edit fields, manage displays, and even map fields to RDF.

A few known issues that aren't quite as we'd like them yet:

Derivative creation is still being developed, so you have to add your own thumbnails and medium-sized files.

You can only use jpegs for the MEDIUM_SIZE datastream. This is a quick fix, but it didn't quite make it into the sandbox, so expect to see this corrected in the near future.

We will periodically wipe and restore the sandbox, so don't put anything there that you want to keep. If you would like your own enduring copy of Islandora CLAW to play with, you can build your own virtual machine with the Islandora CLAW Vagrant.

You can see slides from the sessions where we launched the next phase of CLAW here:

This is just a reminder that this week will mark the first time we're using our alternating schedule for CLAW Calls, alternating between 9:00 AM EST to 1:00 PM EST each week, so that we can welcome Islandora users from more time zones. This week's meeting will be at 9:00AM EST on July 12th. Agenda here.

If this is your first CLAW Call (or your first CLAW Call in a while), don't worry. We'll start with a long recap and update to get you up to speed. We hope to see you there!